Caroline is very quiet, and very still, like she’s waiting for God to realize that this is wrong; like she’s waiting for God to take it back. God does no such thing.

Caroline begins to scream.

Within the hour, everyone on the street is out and searching for the missing child. Every house has been checked, every duvet pulled back and every cupboard opened. Anastasia is not in any yard, not watching television in any babysitter’s living room, not asleep in any bed. Anastasia is gone.

Within two hours, the street is crawling with police. Search parties, hastily assembled around powerful flashlights, have begun combing the woods. They call Anastasia’s name, over and over again, until the crows roosting in the trees take off, startled into frenzied motion.

And Anastasia is gone.

Some of the searchers come within feet of the green bundle deep in the trees, but they take no notice of it. There is no enticing smell, and the flower—the bright, impossible, obviously alien flower—has closed its petals as the plant it grew from devotes all its energy to the task of germination. The inevitable has happened. What comes after might still be avoided …

But they do not notice, do not see. They scream the name of a little girl and walk past her resting place at the same time.

The search continues, and Anastasia is gone.

6.

Three days. That is the amount of time required to drain a body dry, to render it as frail as a cicada’s discarded exoskeleton or an empty seedpod. When the tendrils of the green, green vines finally unwind from their prize, what they drop to the forest floor bears no more resemblance to a human child than it does to a lizard’s shed skin. It is already crumbling, falling apart, dissolving into the dust that birthed it.

Anastasia’s clothing remains surprisingly intact, torn in a few small places, stained in a few more, but not even as dirty as it should be after three days in the depths of the wood. The impossible flower has collapsed inward on itself, dying, drying up, until no one but the canniest of botanists would be able to tell that it doesn’t belong here. The stalk, meanwhile, has thickened, grown gravid with the great seed that is its life’s work and purpose on this world.